Declaring the End from the Beginning

“Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:” (Isaiah 46:9-10).

In the forty-sixth chapter of Isaiah the gods of Babylon are loaded onto animals and carried away: “Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts, and upon the cattle: your carriages were heavy loaden; they are a burden to the weary beast” (Isaiah 46:1). The gods men had bowed to are now a load on the backs of weary animals, and the next verse completes the picture: “They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but themselves are gone into captivity” (Isaiah 46:2). The idols could not deliver the people who had trusted them, and they went into captivity with them.

Against that picture the LORD sets Himself, and He draws the contrast so plainly that a child can follow it. The idols must be carried; God carries. “And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you” (Isaiah 46:4). He is speaking to a people He names, “O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the house of Israel” (Isaiah 46:3), and the chapter ends where that people’s hope ends, “I will place salvation in Zion for Israel my glory” (Isaiah 46:13). Both of those belong in view at once. The promise is Israel’s and stays Israel’s, while the character of the Speaker is the same in every age He has ever spoken into.

He does not stop at power; He asks the question no maker of idols can answer: “To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like?” (Isaiah 46:5). He is asking them to name the thing they would set beside Him. Nothing in creation is His equal, so there is nothing to liken Him to.

He answers that question Himself four verses later, by pointing to what He declared before it came to pass. Prophecy is the evidence God submitted for His own deity. It is ordered, because His counsel stands. It is centered upon a Person, since “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10). And it is bounded, because the God who has revealed a great deal has deliberately kept some things back.

A God You Have to Pick Up

Isaiah is not comparing two religious opinions. He is comparing two directions of dependence, and he does it by describing how an idol is made.

“They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith; and he maketh it a god: they fall down, yea, they worship. They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry him, and set him in his place, and he standeth; from his place shall he not remove: yea, one shall cry unto him, yet can he not answer, nor save him out of his trouble” (Isaiah 46:6-7).

Note the order, understanding that the order is the crux of the argument. The man lavishes, weighs, hires, makes, falls down, worships, bears, carries, and sets, and through all nine of those the god does exactly one thing, which is that he standeth. Then a man in trouble cries to him, and the thing that could not move cannot answer either.

There is one man in the Bible who acted as though God needed holding up. “And when they came to Nachon’s threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God” (2 Samuel 6:6-7). The Bible does not leave us guessing what the error was, David names it when he moves the ark the second time: “For because ye did it not at the first, the LORD our God made a breach upon us, for that we sought him not after the due order” (1 Chronicles 15:13). God had said how it was to be carried, “And thou shalt put the staves into the rings by the sides of the ark, that the ark may be borne with them” (Exodus 25:14), and by whom, “the sons of Kohath shall come to bear it” (Numbers 4:15). Instead “they set the ark of God upon a new cart” (2 Samuel 6:3), and Uzzah’s hand on the ark was the last step of a disobedience that began when the ark was set on a new cart. The LORD did not need Uzzah’s hand. He had asked for obedience to His appointed way, and He asks the same of us.

The carried idols of Isaiah 46 are set there for contrast. The question under trial is which speaker is God, and the LORD settles that question by what a speaker is able to say about a thing which has not happened yet.

The Claim and the Proof

Isaiah 46:9-10 gives a claim and a proof.

The claim is this: “I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me” (Isaiah 46:9). The proof is this: “Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done” (Isaiah 46:10). He then fastens the proof to His own will, “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure” (Isaiah 46:10), and He performs it in the very next verse: “yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it” (Isaiah 46:11).

Note what He did not put in that place. Not His power, not His age, and not the size of what He has made, though all three were His to name. He named instead the one thing no creature can counterfeit without being found out. He tells what is not yet done, and then He does it.

He is therefore no spectator reading a future in which He has no say. A prediction, as men ordinarily use the word, is the report of somebody who claims to have seen tomorrow, and Isaiah presents no such man anywhere in the chapter. God announces what He intends to do, and the announcement often stands long before the doing, which leaves any man who wishes to test Him entirely free to go and check.

Consider the instance of Cyrus, king of Persia, “I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me” (Isaiah 45:4), and He named him in the chapter before: “That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid” (Isaiah 44:28), and Ezra records the man doing that very thing: “Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah” (Ezra 1:2). Note the phrase the LORD used of Cyrus, shall perform all my pleasure, and then note the phrase He uses of Himself two chapters later, I will do all my pleasure. The pleasure is the same, the king is the instrument He named in advance.

The willingness to be checked is not confined to what He foretells, either. “He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing” (Job 26:7). A man who cannot yet test a promise about the latter days can test that one against the world he is standing on, and it holds. He has not asked any man to take His word without evidence. He put His word into a record with names, numbers, and years in it, produced the evidence Himself, and invited the examination.

Religions write books that begin with the Bible and then turn the reader away from it, to The Watchtower, to the Book of Mormon, to the Quran. The pattern does not vary much. A man who wants God is shown the Bible, and then he is led to another book before he is rooted and grounded in what God said. Every one of those systems requires a second book before its deception can be done, which is to say it treats this one as a threshold rather than as the last word.

There is one God, and He has made Himself known in this Book. How do we know it? He said so, and He staked the claim on declaring the end from the beginning without once failing to bring it to pass.

The Empty Docket

Five chapters earlier the same terms are set out in open court. “Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob” (Isaiah 41:21). The defendants are the idols of the nations, and the evidence He will accept from them is narrow, single, and public: “Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods” (Isaiah 41:23).

Consider what He does not ask for. He does not ask them to explain the world, because a story good enough to explain anything can be revised the moment it fails. He does not ask them to work a wonder, because a wonder is over before it can be examined. He does not ask them to gather a following, because a following proves only that something attracts men, and men will supply out of their own hearts whatever an ambiguous oracle leaves unsaid. He asks for declaration before fulfillment, which is the one test no revision can rescue.

Then, in the same courtroom, He returns the verdict upon His own challenge: “yea, there is none that sheweth, yea, there is none that declareth, yea, there is none that heareth your words” (Isaiah 41:26). The docket is empty.

What has not happened yet is not a different class of speech from what already has. The God who named Cyrus before his day is the God who has said His feet shall stand upon the mount of Olives. Why should the later word fail when the earlier word has not?

Settle that in your own heart before you read another line of prophecy. A church does not study these things because it is curious about the future. We study prophecy because it is the evidence God submitted for His own deity. A congregation that never examines it has left the Lord’s own exhibit lying unopened in the courtroom where He filed it.

The One Program and Its One Person

The prophets set out one ordered program, and that program runs from Judah carried away into Babylon to a city which has no need of the sun. So far as history has reached, every part of it has come exactly as He said it would. What remains is therefore as sure as what is past, and it is sure upon the same ground, which is the character of the One who spoke it.

Judah was carried to Babylon for her sins and held there for a term God had fixed in advance and in figures: “and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years” (Jeremiah 25:11). Daniel sat in that captivity and read the number for himself. In the first year of Darius (Daniel 9:1) he read it: “In the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet, that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem” (Daniel 9:2). A prophet counting years out of another prophet’s book is what it looks like when a man takes God at His word on a matter he can check. While Judah sat there, God gave a kingdom to the very king who had carried her away, and Daniel said it directly to Nebuchadnezzar: “Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory” (Daniel 2:37), and then, “Thou art this head of gold” (Daniel 2:38). Set that beside the Lord’s words, that Jerusalem is “trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Luke 21:24), and the times of the Gentiles are seen to begin with that head of gold. Daniel 2 fixes their end at a stone “cut out of the mountain without hands” (Daniel 2:45), and they have not ended yet.

From that grant until the King returns, Israel as a nation has been subject to Gentile powers. Since then no son of David has sat on her throne, and today she has neither temple nor sacrifice, which is the condition God said she would keep: “For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice” (Hosea 3:4), with her turn still ahead of her: “Afterward shall the children of Israel return, and seek the LORD their God, and David their king” (Hosea 3:5). When Cyrus sent them home it was Zerubbabel who went at their head, “governor of Judah” (Haggai 1:1), not a king. The Bible does call one man “Herod, the king of Judaea” (Luke 1:5). But while Herod sat on that throne, wise men came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” (Matthew 2:2), and “When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him” (Matthew 2:3). The King of the Jews had been born, and He was not Herod. No son of David has reigned over Israel since the captivity.

In 1948 the state of Israel was declared in part of the land, after the United Nations had voted in 1947 to divide it, and the event has been preached ever since as fulfilled prophecy. God identified the land He gave by its two rivers, “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18), and the state of Israel does not hold that land today. The state of Israel is not David upon the throne. This is still Daniel 2, and the stone has not fallen.

Into that Gentile age Messiah the Prince came, and He was cut off: “And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary” (Daniel 9:26). The whole count is stated two verses earlier, “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city” (Daniel 9:24), and the running of it is broken into two stretches in the verse before, “from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks” (Daniel 9:25). Seven and threescore and two make sixty-nine of the seventy, and the sixty-two are named again at the head of verse 26. So the weeks run out to sixty-nine, and there Messiah is cut off, and one week of the seventy is left unaccounted for. Now read verse 26 against verse 27. The seventieth week is not in verse 26 at all; it stands by itself in the next verse, “And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease” (Daniel 9:27), and the prince who confirms it is introduced in verse 26 as “the prince that shall come,” whose people destroy the city and the sanctuary. Verse 26 also puts the destruction of the city and the sanctuary between the cutting off and that week, and that destruction is past, for the city and the sanctuary fell in AD 70. So the seventieth week had not begun when verse 26 closed, and it has not begun since. That a gap stands there is what the verses require; how long it runs they do not say. It is a conclusion drawn by comparing the two verses, not a sentence lifted from either of them.

The prophets searched their own writings concerning “the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow” (1 Peter 1:11), and the age between the two was not shown to them. Paul calls it a mystery “Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:5), “That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel” (Ephesians 3:6). That is the age we live in, in which God visits the Gentiles “to take out of them a people for his name” (Acts 15:14), and places every one who believes the gospel (Jew or Gentile) into the Body of Christ.

Then He calls His own up to meet Him, “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17), and the last of Daniel’s seventy weeks, the seventieth seven of the years Daniel was counting, runs its course, the time the Lord described: “For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be” (Matthew 24:21). The King comes back in glory, and “his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives” (Zechariah 14:4). His saints “lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (Revelation 20:4). After that comes a great white throne, “and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away” (Revelation 20:11), and after that a new heaven and a new earth, and a city that “had no need of the sun” (Revelation 21:23).

That is one program and not ten subjects, and one Person runs through every line, since “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10). This is not finally a study about empires, or numbers, or the calendar. It is the Lord Jesus Christ announced, arrived, rejected, returning, and reigning.

Prophecy rests on doctrine, and a man who has confused Israel with the church will go on to teach, in perfect confidence, an idea the Bible never provided. The time of Jacob’s trouble is Jacob’s: “it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it” (Jeremiah 30:7). If a man has persuaded himself that he is Israel, consistency ought to put him into that trouble alongside Jacob; and if he says he is Israel and then exempts himself from Jacob’s trouble, he has not become more spiritual, he has become inconsistent. The second error follows from the first. And failure to be consistent in error, that is another problem entirely.

Opening and Alleging

A program of that size is either proved out of the Bible or it is worth nothing, and the proving is never done by the confidence of the man who states it. When Paul came to Thessalonica, “as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scriptures” (Acts 17:2), “Opening and alleging, that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead; and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ” (Acts 17:3). He did two things in that synagogue. Alleging occurs only in that verse, and the verse itself shows what it means, for what Paul alleged follows it: “that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead.” He opened the scriptures in front of them, and then he laid his claim down beside the text he had opened, so that his hearers saw the claim and the verse in the same glance and could judge for themselves whether the one fit the other. Nothing in that room rested upon the apostle’s reputation. Everything rested upon the written word of God, and a man who wanted to test him held the means of testing him in his hands.

That method decides a great deal more than the tone of a sermon. It decides how far a conclusion may be carried, and there are three cases, which a hearer must always be able to tell apart. Where the text itself establishes a matter, the conclusion is firm and is to be stated firmly, and a teacher who softens it there is not being careful but unfaithful. Where a conclusion is not stated in any one place, but is assembled out of several by comparing one passage with another until the pieces agree, then the comparison is the whole proof, and it must be laid out in the open where the hearer can walk the length of it for himself. And where the Bible has not settled the question at all, the honest thing is to say so in the same voice used for everything else, and to stop. What ruins prophetic teaching is the quiet promotion of the second case into the first, and of the third case into the second. The moment a link is asserted instead of shown, whatever rests upon it has stopped being doctrine and has become conjecture, however respectable the man passing it along and however many generations have passed it before him.

A hearer who cannot tell which of the three cases he has been given is not being taught at all. He is being asked to trust, and trust in a teacher was never the ground the prophets stood upon.

Churches are generally offered one of two things. Some men divide the word rightly and then build so cluttered a house that a plain person cannot live in it. Others build orderly systems and never rightly divide, so that the house is tidy and also wrong, and because it is tidy, Christians buy into it. Almost every systematic theology a man is likely to be handed is Calvinist. Charles Hodge of Princeton is, and Louis Berkhof of Calvin Seminary is, and Wayne Grudem is. These are careful and orderly workmen who meant to honour the Bible, and that is precisely why a man who takes up residence in that house will pick up the furniture whether he intended to or not. Both things are required together: the word rightly divided, and then laid out so that a workman can follow it. Definitions before use, and foundation before walls.

None of this requires a seminary shelf. It requires a Bible, and the patience to lay line beside line.

What the Foundation Has to Hold

Peter was on the holy mount, and he heard the voice out of the cloud. He was among the “eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16). Then he writes: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy” (2 Peter 1:19). More sure than what he had seen with his own eyes upon that mountain. If Gabriel were to stand in front of you in the full glory of an angel, and you had the Bible in your hand, you would be right to take the Bible, because sight can be misremembered, and a dream can be nothing but a dream, and an angel is under the same word as a man: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). Peter gives the reason two verses further on: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). The authority of the prophetic word does not rest in the prophet’s personality. It rests in the Speaker, and that is why the word outranks even the eyesight of the man who carried it.

A church has to be put in remembrance, and Peter makes the practice apostolic: “Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them” (2 Peter 1:12). Note the last clause. Teaching a congregation what it already knows is not wasted breath, for a truth that is known and no longer rehearsed hardens first into a slogan, and then into a tradition which nobody present can open the Bible and prove.

God has two bodies of truth, and they are never to be mixed. The one was “spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began” (Acts 3:21). The other “was kept secret since the world began” (Romans 16:25). The same span of time, and two opposite intentions toward it. Paul’s next words are “But now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations” (Romans 16:26). He does not say the prophets of old were shown it. He says it was kept secret, and is now made manifest and made known.

Israel is Israel. Paul has a form he uses all through Romans: he raises the question that would undo the faith, he answers it, and then he proves the answer. Shall the unbelief of some make the faith of God without effect? “God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:3-4). Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? “God forbid” (Romans 6:2). He does it ten times in that one epistle, at the law, at grace, at whether there is unrighteousness with God, and twice regarding the nation of Israel: “I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew” (Romans 11:1-2). The answer is the same answer, and the proof he offers is his own flesh. If you believed him in chapter three, you do not get to stop believing him in chapter eleven. The church has replaced nobody. Your Bible counts three companies upon the earth, “neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God” (1 Corinthians 10:32), and every promise the Book makes goes to the company it was addressed to.

God counts time in the Bible, and wherever He converts one measure into another He says so in the text. “each day for a year” (Numbers 14:34). “seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years” (Leviticus 25:8). Where He has stated the exchange we may use it, and where He has not stated it we may not invent it.

The guard stone is set in the Lord’s own words: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36). After the resurrection the apostles asked Him whether He would at that time restore again the kingdom to Israel, and He told them, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power” (Acts 1:7). In September of 2025 a man named Joshua Mhlakela announced that the rapture would take place on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of that month, and said he was a billion percent sure of it. The twenty-fourth came and went, and then the date moved. The reason given was that the Julian calendar runs behind ours, and so the rapture would come in early October instead. Every number the Bible counts is to be counted, and counted carefully. The number God kept to Himself is never to be taken up at all. Where the Bible stops, we stop with it.

Therefore

The study of Bible prophecy is not first an attempt to master the future. It is submission to the God who has already declared it.

If God has spoken, no headline adds certainty to a passage, and none was ever missing from it. If God has spoken, an unfulfilled promise has not thereby become an uncertain promise. If God has spoken, Israel cannot be made to disappear because a system has run out of room for the nation. If God has spoken, then Christ will return whether men mock His coming, spiritualize it, postpone it, or deny it outright.

His sure word does a great deal more than answer our questions. It settles which voice is final, which distinctions have to be kept, which measures we are permitted to use, and where honest study is obliged to stop.

The idols still have to be carried. Every failed date, every quietly revised prediction, every promise transferred off the nation it was made to, and every private revelation that begins with this Book and ends somewhere else, is one more load strapped onto the back of a weary beast, and the men doing the strapping are worshippers, as the men of the chapter were: “they fall down, yea, they worship” (Isaiah 46:6). The LORD bears no such weight. He carries His people, He keeps His counsel, and He brings His word to pass.

The idols of Babylon had to be carried, and the LORD carries His people. He declared the end from the beginning, and He will do all His pleasure.

And the One who runs through every line of it is offered to you now. He was announced, and He arrived, and He was cut off, and He was raised, and it is written what you are to do with Him: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9). The God who keeps His counsel has never once failed to bring His word to pass.

Thomas Irvin
Pastor, Victory Baptist Church, Coden, Alabama
www.VBCoden.com

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